| |
| Writing about Delhi |
| |
(First appeared in Time Out, Delhi, (January 25 February 7 2008, The Books issue)
The great cities of the world, people say, have inspired great
writing: New York, Paris, London, and yes, even Mumbai. Delhi, it
appears, is unloved. Where is the masterwork that captures this city
in a grand and tender sweep? Does the absence of a great Delhi book
imply that Delhi itself is not a great city?
The main contenders for the title are ambitious works that attempt to
weave the past into the present. In William Dalrymple's City of Djinns
the past shines like a trove of gems, but the present is a flimsy
bauble of expat life in the early nineties. And in Khushwant Singh's
Delhi - a book that can still, twenty-four years down the line, claim
to contain the most searing piece of writing about the 1984 riots that
has appeared in fiction - the excursions into the past get in the way
of a deeply felt narrative of the present. In both cases one side sits
heavy in the balance.
Another underrated contender for the Great Delhi Novel is Krishna
Sobti's Dil-o-Danish (translated into English as The Heart Has Its
Reasons), the story of a successful lawyer living in Delhi in the
early part of the twentieth century, who is torn between the demands
of his two wives, one Muslim, one Hindu. Written with an assurance
that can come only from the pen of a mature writer at the height of
her powers, Dil-o-Danish avoids the pitfall of nostalgia to which most
historical fiction set in Delhi succumbs. Its claim to being the
canonical narrative of this city is made explicit only in a moving set
of paragraphs right in the end, and in the cover of the original Hindi
hardback from Rajkamal Prakashan: a line drawing of the view from one
of Jama Masjid's minarets.
It may well be that of the time described in Dil-o-Danish there is a
particular story to be told, a set of narratives that walks backwards
down Chandni Chowk doing sijdah to the Fort as it goes. In the wake of
subaltern studies this appears hard to believe, but I can't disprove
it either. In any case, when we turn to writings about the present, we
find that writing the Great Delhi Novel does not appear to be anyone's
project.
Manju Kapur's saga of a large joint family from Karol Bagh, Home, or
Sujit Saraf's Chandni Chowk-centric take on contemporary Indian
politics, The Peacock Throne, can be read as attempts to create a
master narrative for Delhi. But they are freed from the burden of
being the Great Delhi Novel and allowed simply to be novels set in
Delhi when we place their stories next to stories of north-easterners
trying to make it in the nation's capital (Jet City Woman by Ankush
Saikia) or stories of hard-partying thirty-something women loving and
losing in fashionable nightspots around the city (Almost Single by
Advaita Kala). Saikia and Kala are part of a new set of novelists that
believe in zooming in, in telling specific stories. Their characters'
situations may not be unique, but they are definitely not close to
being universal. Similarly specific is the condition of Selina Sen's
Bengali women in A Mirror Greens in Spring, trying to come to terms
with life in a city of Punjabi men. In my own novel, Above Average, a
trans-Yamuna boy talented enough to get into IIT tries to cope with
the intensity of his own ambition. In all these books the
particularity of the urban experience is paramount, and this
paramountcy creates a series of overlays that provides a depth to the
picture of the city.
With the unfolding of a multiplicity of stories, the danger that some
writer will try to hoodwink readers by capturing Delhi in a
twelve-hundred-page volume is receding. The definitive book about a
great city cannot be a book. It must always be a library. And a great
city is one whose writers instinctively understand this. |
| |
|
